Because we remember pain and the menace of death more vividly than
pleasure, and because our feelings toward the beneficent aspects of
the unknown have from the first been captured and formalised by
conventional religious rituals, it has fallen to the lot of the darker
and more maleficent side of cosmic mystery to figure chiefly in our
popular supernatural folklore. The tendency, too, is naturally
enhanced by the fact that uncertainty and danger are closely allied;
thus making any kind of an unknown world, a world of peril and evil
possibilities. When to this sense of fear and evil the inevitable
fascination of wonder and curiosity is superadded, there is born a
composite body of keen emotion and imaginative provocation whose
vitality must of necessity endure as long as the human race itself.
Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds
sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of
the hidden and fathomless worlds or strange life which may pulsate in
the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in
unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse.
With this foundation, no one need wonder at the existence of a
literature of cosmic fear. It has always existed, and always will
exist; and no better evidence of its tenacious vigour can be cited
than the impulse which now and then drives writers of totally opposite
leanings to try their hands at it in isolated tales, as if to
discharge from their minds certain phantasmal shapes which would
otherwise haunt them. Thus did Dickens write several eerie narratives;
Browning the hideous poem, "Childe Roland"; Henry James, "The Turn of
the Screw"; Dr. Holmes, the subtle novel "Elsie Venner"; F. Marion
Crawford, "The Upper Berth" and a number of other examples; Mrs.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, social worker, "The Yellow Wall Paper";
whilst the humorist, W. W. Jacobs, produced that able melodramatic bit
called "The Monkey's Paw."
(Continued next month)